Ernesto Priego and Chris Zarate found they were both archiving #MLA14 tweets using Martin Hawksey‘s Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet TAGS (“a quick way to collect tweets, make publicly available and collaborate exploring the data”, says Hawksey.) As Priego details in a series of excellent blogposts about their work, they combined their datasets and deduplicating them with OpenRefine.This they then turned into a CSV file, which contains 21,915 tweets posted during the actual convention.

As Priego said last year, “The MLA has been a pioneering academic organization in embracing Twitter. Since 2007 the so-called “conference back channel” has been growing considerably. Adoption of Twitter amongst scholars and students seems on the rise as well, and reporting live from the conference is no longer an underground, parallel activity but pretty much a recognized, encouraged aspect of the event.”

The opportunities for network analysis of such an expansive set of open data are great, and we hope that folks will make use of the archive to glean some insights into how scholars from a variety of disciplines are using Twitter before, during, and after, academic conferences. The #MLA14 Twitter archive can be found in Academic Commons here: http://bit.ly/MLA14TwitterArchive

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Academic Commons, which is run by Columbia Libraries/Information Services’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, is Columbia University’s digital repository. Content in Academic Commons is freely available to the public: academiccommons.columbia.edu